Monday’s blockchain news, from Asia and beyond

‘Unbiased’ blockchain search engine launched in India: Aarzoo Search’s CEO, Vinod Sujan, says Google has gone “rogue” because of its over-reliance on “sponsored” searches while his blockchain-based search engine is non-partisan because it will charge the businesses that use it. Vinod told Livemint that with Aarzoo “the search happens in real time and as the information is not filtered, the user will get unfiltered results without any bias.” But as Business Week India asks, will the project, that has taken more than four years to develop, manage to break the monopoly to find a market?

TRON goes deep into gaming: TRON Arcade is a $100-million fund for blockchain gaming that aims, according to the cryptocurrency’s foundation, to “empower developers to create and execute on their ideas, to introduce new games and content into an autonomous ecosystem, and to build a strong community of content and entertainment”. While gaming in blockchain was in the past mainly about Cryptokitties, blockchain is becoming an increasingly important area of development for the gaming industry. TRON, based in USA and in China, has been accused in the past of copycat software development and has never been far from controversy. And now its July purchase of the “grey market” file sharing BitTorrent network seems to have been made in anticipation to this move into gaming.

G20 leaders discuss taxes on cryptocurrency: It may have been a sideshow to the highly anticipated meeting of US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping at the G20 Summit in Buenos Aires but discussions on digital currencies have reportedly led to potentially important draft agreements on an international system of cross-border taxation for cryptocurrencies and also for global measures to counter money-laundering via digital currencies. The G20 countries have agreed to do further work on the drafts with a view to discussing them further when they meet next year in Japan so they will be able to sign final versions by the year 2020.

November was Bitcoin’s worst month in seven years: Bitcoin has just emerged from its worst month in terms of price declines for seven years. The world’s oldest, most popular and valuable crypto shed almost 40% of its value in this one month alone as it started out at over $6,500 on November 1 and had fallen to below $4,000 by the start of December. What next? Well, many are saying this is the start of a another boom period. Well, yes of course.